AUTHOR’S NOTE: I just rejoined the r/SecularTarot sub-reddit feed, and another member asked how the secular diviner reads the cards without mystical input. Lately I’ve been thinking of myself more as a “rational” reader than a “spiritual” or “psychological” one, so in answer to this request I decided to summarize where I’ve landed since I returned to professional practice in 2011 after having privately explored esoteric and psycho-spiritual metaphysics for the previous 35 years.

As one might expect from a lapsed Mensan and retired engineering manager with no religious leanings, my interpretive style is more cerebral than emotional; I want to see all the dots connected with no need for extraordinary leaps of intuition to fill in any gaps. If divination “works” as advertised, it should do so with intelligence and sophistication, not rely mainly on impromptu seat-of-the pants guesswork for its insights regardless of whether that awareness is purported to come from an “all-knowing” divine source. I try to keep sloppy thinking out of my own approach at all times without becoming too sterile in my presentation. (It is, after all, a performance art.)

Obviously, there are more than two “ingredients” in an effective tarot reading, but logic guarantees that it won’t be too out-of-touch with reality (always a risk with bias-prone intuitive interpretation) and imagination makes for vivid narrative output. If I were to add anything, it would be refined language skills and an extensive vocabulary to match; a preference for embedded wisdom over visual free-association; and an ability to reconcile modern techniques with the historical baseline, a talent that is much maligned by “freestyle” psychic readers who shun “book-learning.”

In the last 15 years I’ve aligned my methods for reading tarot cards with the way I read Lenormand cards:

Almost no free-association from the images (there is none in Lenormand reading);

Infrequent reliance on “canned narrative vignettes” (as in RWS) and even then only peripheral;

Limited intuitive guesswork; I “just read the cards” using inspiration, imagination and ingenuity;

Only a couple of key meanings for each card to start a reading, with improvisation thereafter as needed;

A primarily literal as opposed to mystical style (~80%/20%);

An action-and-event-oriented locus with very little psychological and spiritual emphasis;

Routine use of positional spreads (mostly self-created);

A carefully-structured approach to spread design;

Major Arcana as environmental themes or situational backdrops, not significant events;

Limited use of archetypal and mythological tropes in favor of a more topical scope;

Focused mainly on TdM and Thoth decks; infrequent application of the RWS tarot;

Liberal use of suit and number theory, with a bit of color correspondence;

Introduction of shared cultural, social, historical, literary and philosophical metaphors and analogies;

Subliminal induction via the shuffle as the explanation for “how tarot works;”

Subconscious prescience as a “local field” phenomenon in face-to-face settings as opposed to the “distributed (aka psychic) awareness” of remote reading;

Avoidance of “mind-reading-with-props” scenarios (aka “thinks-or-feels” questions);

A cognitive/creative mindset with an appreciation for both precise analysis and visionary storytelling;

Internalization of traditional knowledge with minimal need for freestyle extemporizing to flesh it out.